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The Shape of Water (2017)
(SPOILERS) The faithful would have you believe it never went
away, but it’s been a good decade since Guillermo del Toro’s mojo was in full
effect, and his output since (or lack thereof: see the torturous wilderness
years of At the Mountains of Madness
and The Hobbit), reflected through
the prism of his peak work Pan’s
Labyrinth, bears the hallmarks of a serious qualitative tumble. He put his
name to stinker TV show The Strain,
returned to movies with the soulless Pacific
Rim and fashioned flashy but empty gothic romance Crimson Peak (together his weakest pictures, and I’m not forgetting
Mimic). The Shape of Water only seems to underline what everyone has been
saying for years, albeit previously confined to his Spanish language pictures: that
the smaller and more personal they are, the better. If his latest is at times a
little too wilfully idiosyncratic,
it’s also a movie where you can nevertheless witness it’s creator’s creativity
flowing untrammelled once mo…

The X-Files 11.2: This
(SPOILERS) Glen Morgan returns with a really good idea, certainly one
with much more potential than his homelessness tract Home Again in Season 10, but seems to give up on its eerier
implications, and worse has to bash it round the head to fit the season’s
“arc”. Nevertheless, he’s on very comfortable ground with the Mulder-Scully
dynamic in This, who get to spend
almost the entire episode in each other’s company and might be on the best form
here since the show came back, give or take a Darin.

The X-Files 11.1: My Struggle III
(SPOILERS) Good grief. Have things become so terminal for Chris Carter
that he has to retcon his own crap from the previous season, rather than the
(what he perceived as) crap written by others? Carter, of course, infamously
pretended the apocalyptic ending of Millennium
Season Two never happened, upset by the path Glen Morgan and James Wong, left
to their own devices, took with his baby. Their episode was one of the greats
of that often-ho-hum series, so the comedown was all the unkinder as a result. In
My Struggle III, at least, Carter’s
rewriting something that wasn’t very good in the first place. Only, he replaces
it with something that is even worse in the second.

Dreamscape (1984)
(SPOILERS) I wasn’t really au fait with movies’ box office performance until the end of the ‘80s, so I think I had an idea that Dennis Quaid (along with Jeff Bridges) was a much bigger star than he was, just on the basis of the procession of cool movies he showed up in (The Right Stuff, Enemy Mine, Innerspace, D.O.A.) The truth was, the public resisted all attempts to make him The Next Big Thing, not that his sly-grinned, cocky persona throughout the decade would lead you to believe his dogged lack of success had any adverse effect on his mood. Dreamscape was one of his early leading-man roles, and if it’s been largely forgotten, it also inherits a welcome cult status, not only through being pulpy and inventive on a fairly meagre budget, but by being pretty good to boot. It holds up.

Mudbound (2017)
(SPOILERS) Mudbound
has had to make do with just the four Oscar nominations, all well-deserved
(although honestly, I’m not so fussed by the overly earnest song), failing to
trouble the big four categories, but it’s a much better film than at least
several of the nine selected for the top prize. Perhaps that’s a reflection of
the Netflix factor, or that Academy members only feel inclined to given the nod
to one movie about racism per year. Mudbound,
set in and around Jim Crow Mississipi in the ‘40s, isn’t just about racism, but
it’s infused into its characters and locale such that all other themes are
informed or affected by it. At times, there’s a sense that it’s trying to
achieve too much, spread its canvas too broadly for the time it has, but when
it hits its stride, it’s outstanding.